Bloody Courage chapter 6
by Zack Gregson
Summary: As Courage goes further into the only home he ever knew, he finds deeper memories that become a more wounding pain than ever before.


**Chapter 6**

**The Scent of Guilt**

The stairs had taken his weight well enough, despite restless protests of squeaks and groans, as if he were walking along a row of graves, disturbing the dead wood.

He reached the long hallway, half of it carved through with the power of the flames, though the doorways seemed to remain, being stronger set than the weaker walls. At least he knew where the rooms were, but-

_He could remember it all. He knew every length and breadth of this house. He could smell the planks of wood cloistering around him, the soot of the basement, the food from the kitchen (ohhh those pies were heaven captured in a single taste, even though they now seemed to be connected to Hell in Courage's mind) and the smell of...Muriel._

_Yes. She had her own scent like every human does. Courage loved her scent. It wasn't cheap and falsely expensive like perfume, but neither was it as plain as a hot pie (well, HER pies were not plain but he meant other ordinary pies, the ones unworthy to be made in her pie-tin). It was a mixture of the two. It was-_

Another flashback. He remembered seeing the hallway and was walking along it. His memory tried to kick in. He knew that there were three rooms on the top floor. The bathroom, the bedroom and the computer room.

First thing along the hallway was the bathroom, he knew that. Then the bedroom further up with the computer room at the far end. He walked slowly on the wood, keeping his weight careful on the floor as he let each groan of the floor beneath him permeate in the air and turn silent before walking on. When he reached the bathroom door, he felt-

_Unclean. He wasn't clean. Muriel never minded him so much when he was all filthy from the day but he had to clean himself. He went upstairs to the bathroom and felt the scrubbing of the cold water on his paws, turning his fur a darker wetter purple, almost a silken colour. The sink was high and next to the shower/bath, a faded yellow tub of hospital green curtain, along with the toilet opposite it, next to the window._

_He had to look at the-_

This flashback had a very painful headache come with it. It was painful enough for the dog to nearly collapse on the floor, but he grabbed the doorjamb when he felt it. A hot stinging bruise to his head, as if a giant wasp planted its alkaline stinger directly into his brain, driving his nerves down with an intense flash of pain that almost made him faint straight away. He had held onto the door frame with a reflex, like the sailor holding onto the railings of the ship in a storm.

He certainly felt a storm inside his head, a storm of memories that washed over him with such ferocity that nearly wanted to make him abandon the ship of his sanity and just drown in confused sorrow to be done with it. Something was not right in the bathroom. Something...but he could never guess what.

He didn't remember the bathroom in his memories until now. Maybe they were blocked out for now. He felt they had for the wave of pain and fear he suddenly got in the vicinity of the bathroom door.

The Starmaker tried to soothe Courage by rubbing her tendrils on his face and forehead more soothingly, the cold touch very comforting to his flushed head. She couldn't really penetrate any deeper in the memories for fear of driving him beyond his mental endurance. And Courage was now unlocking piece by broken piece all by himself. She would let him deal with it, and just watch them play inside his mind, a lone creature sitting at the theatre of pain that was Courage's life, portrayed on screen within his mind.

Courage walked away from the bathroom, not even daring to look inside after the forcefully sore flashback that warned of something damaging. The next room along was the main bedroom, where Muriel and Eustace slept in their large double bed, a very warming sight it was.

_That oval rug was also in the room as well. They liked that pattern a lot. There was the separate drawers respectfully sitting at the walls, Muriel's mirror, and that gorgeous bed. That soft pink covered bed that made Courage sleep many a night in peace and warmth when he curled up on the duvet and let the window outside reflect all the darkness it wanted, until morning came to wash a whole new day over him pleasantly._

That memory was much more sweeter than the others. That seemed to be the only memory that for once he felt no pain with. Only warmth, the warmth of an almost motherly kind that made him get up to live the days with a stronger heart and clearer mind. All because of Muriel.

Now the room was as empty and as torn as himself. The bed was in cinders, the drawers were burnt through with only the faintest traces of clothing, and the window, now cracked and broken forcefully, had a larger brother to reveal the outside world to, with the huge burnt hole next to it, the fire clawing furiously at it in the past to emerge free like a demon from its mother's womb.

_Courage...did I see you smile?_

He did not reply. He allowed the slight smile to stay on his lips for a while, seeing the room not like what was inside him, but what was formerly a place where he felt safe.

_Courage? Courage?_

Mmm..huh? He had been lost in a reverie of memory temporarily, and the squid's telepathic voice knocked on his head like a polite knock of the door.

_Have you found a good memory?_

I...think I have. But...I'm not sure. Come on, let's look around more.

They soon reached the last room of the top floor, the computer room. It only had a table, chair and the computer itself. It was an old model, probably a DOS computer that mainly was text but did have an internet connection and picture capability. Courage remembered the thing for its cynical tones and mocking of the dog's lack of information, which the computer was there to provide of the many supernatural beasts that the canine had to face over the years.

It wasn't a nice thing, but it helped him a lot. And then-

_He heard the pleading whines of the computer as he was logging off for the last time. What he knew would be the last time. He could see the wires trailing out of it, vital blood veins to the machine, pumping electricity to provide it life and the awakening of it._

_A computer couldn't be destroyed merely by cutting the power._

Another flashback. Courage could remember the familiar green glow of the monitor screen, the words of his queries mixing with the replies of that cynical machine. It was still in the room, amazingly.

Less amazingly, it was burnt out and smashed to pieces. Something hard seemed to have hit its monitor and brained it completely inwards. The rest of the damage was caused by the fire blowing up the circuits, racing along them to leave nothing more than a trail of flames.

The fire however, could not have caused the monitor to be obliterated with such force.

The CPU seemed to be in less of a good shape either, practically as flat as a cybernetic pancake, a crushed length of white casing on the floor with burnt ends of chips and wires still out of it, its entrails boiled inside it to the point of causing sharp bumps of the casing when it tried to escape from the flames, as if they were like people smashing the walls through to escape a burning house.

Escaping a burning house...like...like...something halted him from making that sentence but then another flashback came when he thought of-

_Fire. Fire everywhere, the flames licking their lips as they feasted on everything their wispy hot hands could touch. The walls, the furniture, the glass was tasted and spat out, as those small daggers flew out from the windows under the weight of the flames. The stairs became a pathway to Hell, whether it was upstairs or down, and the whole house became little more than a gateway to Courage's nightmares, even before the fires began._

_But now with this new incident, he knew who did it, and it was one enemy he did not know how to fight._

_He felt the flames burn and scorch his fur, as the red, orange and yellow shadows tried to devour him, tried to take him into their bright cloaks that consumed all life._

_He had run everywhere, but it was futile. The fire didn't manage to swallow Courage, but they did take his life from him._

When he recovered from this flashback, he felt a hot wave flow over him, imagining himself back in the fire, running through those corridors, feeling he was truly in the kingdoms of Hell with the flames as the guardians of evil feasting on the living remnants of the canine's entire life.

He then felt something in him telling him to go somewhere. Another flashback but not as vivid. This was more ghostly, half filtered through his eyes like a transparent double-layer. He felt himself go up the stairs, no more flames, but hot under his feet, before entering the bathroom, holding something in his paws.

He had to go to the bathroom. Something was in there that he had to find.

He walked towards the dreaded doorway with a stronger determination. The pain reeled in his mind, feeling like the afterblow of a furiously strong punch, but he fought against it and entered the last room he had to enter before he could leave.

The bathroom was mostly quite safe. The windows had been blasted out, the shower and tub had fallen through to outside and around the house, the wood weakened enough for it to fall like an obscurely-shaped comet. The toilet was gone, taken perhaps, along with the plumbing, probably to be resold as scrap parts by those who found the house after the fire.

Looking to his left, he saw the mirror and sink. The sink. He was washing his hands in this before...and that mirror he looked into.

It was actually a medicine cabinet with the mirror as the door, and Courage felt the need to look at himself. As he did so, the Starmaker quivered on top of his head, as if a sharp draught of wind hit above his head unawares.

What's wrong?

This time, she did not reply. The dog clambered up onto the sink and examined himself in the mirror.

His eyes had sunken heavily, showing the signs of how madness, depression and confusion had made his disposition worse. Even when he was fighting maniacs and supernatural legends, his eyes had a resounding clarity to them, shining of intelligence and fierce loyalty that allowed him to tap into his courageous reservoir.

Now, with cracked eyes, matted fur rough and dirty, and scars along his body, he looked like shit.

He was about to turn away when he looked down at the sink and saw something sticking out of the drain. Something got stuck when it fell into the drain, a thin black piece of plastic and he also noticed the glass fragments glinting weakly around it.

Reaching at the small piece of plastic, he hoisted it gently from the drain, and with the colour from his face suddenly draining down into the unblocked drain, he found something that truly made sense to him.

Muriel's glasses. Broken and near-snapped in two.

He smelt blood on the glasses. But there was also his own scent. The blood was not his. The blood belonged Eustace, yet it mixed with his own scent.

The memory was unlocked as what he felt was the final piece for the memories of his downfall.

_He had traversed the stairs after the fire. Someone would come if they saw the smoke from the house and called the rescue team. But it was too late, Courage knew that first hand. The wooden stairs still smoked wreaths of grey around him, coiling around him like the smoky trails of the Grim Reaper's cloak, the wood under his feet feeling hot enough to burn his feet. He held his paws tight. One was dripping with liquid and the other held something plastic._

_He reached the bathroom, panting not from exertion but from panic, shaking gasps that rattled through his mouth as they escaped from his body. He was at the sink and looked up at the mirror._

_The mirror reflected eyes of guilt. The eyes were like those of madmen who were so wrapped within guilt that it had become a prison to them. Prisoner eyes._

_Courage looked down and saw his paws open. His right one had sticky spots of blood lathering his fur, even some streaks of sticky maroon red running along his arm. The left paw held Muriel's glasses, the lenses slightly tarnished from the fire. He could feel his heart jumping upwards into his throat, as fits of emotion rose within him. He shook his head and kept muttering "no" to himself over and over again in refusing disbelief. His paw clutched Muriel's glasses tightly, nearly breaking them but cracking the fragile glass which fell around the drain, shining like his tears did as they ran down the drain. Holding both paws together, pressing Eustace's blood and Muriel's spectacles together, bringing the former married couple together for that brief time in death within memory, until death did they part, and by Courage's paws, they were parted. With a building rage of sorrow within his small pup body, he saw his face growing ever wetter with tears from his childlike eyes and felt himself growing more furiously insane as he howled the ending line to this tragic play of Courage's memory._

_MUURRIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLL!_


End file.
